Rob Baueroffline

posts

comments

Views

This is my most recent work that came out a few weeks back. It is nonfiction. Scholarship. Yes! Scholarship! Our club has an author who does research and cites things and doesn’t just make up stories! Crazy, I know, but every book club needs a crazy guy like every family has that crazy uncle, right? 🙂

Here is the description. If you know a serious baseball fan, this might be the thing for them:

After the 1889 baseball season, the players of the National League, furious over their treatment by NL owners, decided to secede from the National League and start their own rival league, the Players League. Their league lasted only one season, but its formation remains one of the seminal events in understanding the trajectory of nineteenth-century baseball. Why is this true?

By learning why the players of the NL elected to strike out on their own, we gain insight into some of the critical issues facing the game in the late 1880s, particularly the relationship between team owners and their players. However, that’s not all. Had a few things gone differently, the Players League might have succeeded. Had it done so, the entire history of major league baseball would have been vastly different. Therefore, understanding the motivations of the players gives us a glimpse of both what was, and what might have been. Put simply, baseball history in the 1890s is incomprehensible without knowledge of the 1890 Players League and how it began.

user badges

About me

Rob Bauer

Historical Novelist, Historian, History Professor

I hold a PhD in history from the University of Arkansas, where I attended school as a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow, as well as several other degrees. In addition to my writing and publishing business, I am the History Department Chair at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana, where I teach United States History, Western Civilization, Montana History, Environmental History, Civil Rights Movement History, and the occasional Honors class.
Besides my love for history, I grew up a sports fan, especially baseball. Once I get all my history books published, you’ll find an entire series of books on baseball in the 1880s. There is at least one non-baseball history book in the works, too, but that era of baseball history fascinates me, and so, after years of researching it, I’m ready to share what I’ve learned with the world.
In my historical novels, I attempt to bring to light some historical events that are not general knowledge. After all, do we really need another Western novel featuring gunfighters or another courtly romance set in the Middle Ages? Not to put down authors who write those books because there have been many good ones over the years, but I’d like to add something new, something a bit more original. That’s why the main character in my first novel, My Australian Adventure, is a young boy named Clarence Duval who travels the world in 1888 as the mascot for a pair of traveling baseball teams. In the third book (upcoming) in the Clarence Duval Series, he takes part in the removal of Cree Indians from Montana in 1896. Even though the world doesn’t remember it anymore, that was a real event, a repeat in miniature of the Trail of Tears experienced by the Cherokee in the 1830s.
When I’m not writing, researching, or teaching, I spend time with my sweetheart of a dog, Ally, and enjoy the outdoors in Western Montana. I also like strategy games, fitness activities, and, of course, reading. I still hope to run that marathon someday.